But, that was a false alarm, say the anti-immigrationists; this is the real thing. Again a lamentable lack of historical perspective, a pitiful narrowness of human sympathy. The truth is that man, from whatever clime or nation, is first of all man, the materials of progress and civilization. If the present millions of newcomers are ignorant, so much the less will they have to unlearn. If they have been savagely oppressed, so much the more brightly will burn hatred of inequality and injustice, love of equality and justice. If they are poor--and poor they are--then, Heaven be praised! They will work hard; and hard work and a passionate eagerness to get on in the world, and the prospect of being able to rise by work instead of, as at home, toiling that others might reap all, will make them hasten to become the best possible Americans. From poverty and experience of oppression comes the most militant Democracy. Let us not be afraid of this our brother-man. Let us not judge him by the superficial and unimportant differences between him and us. Let us welcome him. He needs us, but not more than we need him, and his familiarity with hard work, and his nature unspoiled by over-prosperity. Above all, we need his children. They will be American through and through. They will help us to outvote and to over-balance and to counteract the supercilious breed of falsely educated who have fallen away from the high and noble ideal of the equality and the brotherhood of man. These newcomers are the descendants of the peoples that built the splendid civilization of the past--the civilization around the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe. For centuries the immense energy and imagination of those peoples have been forcibly suppressed and repressed. But they are there, and in free America they will burst forth again. Indeed, they are already bursting forth. We hear so much about the glories of the Civil War that we are apt to overlook its fearful cost. One item is important here: In the Southern States, practically all the white males able to bear arms went to the war. In the Northern States the two and three-quarter millions who served were, on the average, under rather than over twenty years of age. That is to say, to the war the South gave all its manhood; the North gave the fathers of its present native-born generation. So abounding is our vitality as a people that we cannot clearly see the full results of this fearful sacrifice. But let us remember that war kills only a few; it returns to peaceful pursuits the vast majority poisoned and weakened by all kinds of diseases.